Afganistan

[PolyNewbie]

Who benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?

We are not fighting for womens rights, if we stood for that Iraq would have been allowed to invade Kwait.

We are not hunting for Osama because Osama has been dead since 2002.

Our Oligarchy is dependent of the 400 billion dollar per year drug trade.

[Higgly]

There is an interesting piece in Saturday's Globe and Mail by John Polanyi - former University of Toronto Chemistry Professor and Nobel prize winner. He says that the war in Afghanistan is being lost to a large extent because US forces have been busying themselves destroying the poppy crop and punishing farmers who grow and harvest the poppies. As a result, the Afghanis are seeing the US forces not as liberators, but as oppressors.

According to Polanyi, one third of Afghanistans GNP comes from the drug trade. He also says that most of the opiates coming out of Afghanistan, both legal and illegal, are used in the west. His idea is that the poppy farmers should be left alone but that their product should be funnelled into the legal drug trade, and that the price of opiates should be lowered so that they can be used more widely by the medical establishment in the developing world.

I thought it seemed to make a lot of sense.